C doesn’t have standards or official tips once it involves code writing vogue. Having such freedom is repeatedly helpful and additionally important, but collaborating on a project with totally different developers can before long need a group of writing style guidelines. vital to grasp here is that regardless of that coding style you pick, outline it well and follow it when adding new code. Reading code with consistent coding style matters.

Here are the top coding styles you should consider adopting instead of reinventing your own.

• LLVM coding standards
• Google C++ coding style
• Chromium coding style
• Mozilla coding style
• WebKit coding style

Useful tools

Clang-Format

Clang-Format is a set of tools that are built on top of LibFormat that are very useful to format your C code to a predefined coding style.

The main tool is clang-format. You initially create a YAML file called .clang-formatin your project root directory with definitions of how formatting should be done.

Read the documentation about Clang-Format on the official page. This tutorial only serves as a guideline on which tools you should use.

• Clang-Format documentation

EditorConfig

One part is formating existing code. Another part is formatting code as your code. Many editors and IDEs will have predefined coding standards already available, and for more, there is Editorconfig, a project where you can set coding style per project basis. The file .editorconfig with INI syntax includes definitions for files and which coding standards should be used. Most of today’s editors and IDEs support EditorConfig via plugins or have support already built-in.

• EditorConfig.org

C editors and IDEs

You can write C programs in practically any text editor or IDE. Using a text editor instead of an IDE is advised at the beginning so you can fully understand the compilation process and all the magic happening behind it. In this course, you can use any editor you prefer.

Editors

Some editor examples:

• Atom editor
• Visual Studio Code

IDEs

Some IDE examples:

• CLion
• CodeLite
• Netbeans

The difference between editor and IDE is in their functionalities. IDEs provide more functionality compared to editors, such as code refactoring, building and compiling projects, and similar. In editors, you will many times need to use tools from the command line.